We present FoundationSLAM, a learning-based monocular dense SLAM system that addresses the absence of geometric consistency in previous flow-based approaches for accurate and robust tracking and mapping. Our core idea is to bridge flow estimation with geometric reasoning by leveraging the guidance from foundation depth models. To this end, we first develop a Hybrid Flow Network that produces geometry-aware correspondences, enabling consistent depth and pose inference across diverse keyframes. To enforce global consistency, we propose a Bi-Consistent Bundle Adjustment Layer that jointly optimizes keyframe pose and depth under multi-view constraints. Furthermore, we introduce a Reliability-Aware Refinement mechanism that dynamically adapts the flow update process by distinguishing between reliable and uncertain regions, forming a closed feedback loop between matching and optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FoundationSLAM achieves superior trajectory accuracy and dense reconstruction quality across multiple challenging datasets, while running in real-time at 18 FPS, demonstrating strong generalization to various scenarios and practical applicability of our method.

Over the past two decades, research in the field of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) has undergone a significant evolution, highlighting its critical role in enabling autonomous exploration of unknown environments. This evo-lution ranges from hand-crafted methods, through the era of deep learning, to more recent developments focused on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) rep-resentations. Recognizing the growing body of research and the absence of a comprehensive survey on the topic, this paper aims to provide the first comprehensive overview of SLAM progress through the lens of the latest advancements in radiance fields. It sheds light on the background, evolutionary path, inherent strengths and limitations, and serves as a fundamental reference to highlight the dynamic progress and specific challenges.

We introduce Stereo Anywhere, a novel stereo-matching framework that combines geometric constraints with robust priors from monocular depth Vision Foundation Models (VFMs). By elegantly coupling these complementary worlds through a dual-branch architecture, we seamlessly integrate stereo matching with learned contextual cues. Following this design, our framework introduces novel cost volume fusion mechanisms that effectively handle critical challenges such as textureless regions, occlusions, and nonLambertian surfaces. Through our novel optical illusion dataset, MonoTrap, and extensive evaluation across multiple benchmarks, we demonstrate that our synthetic-only trained model achieves state-of-the-art results in zero-shot generalization, significantly outperforming existing solutions while showing remarkable robustness to challenging cases such as mirrors and transparencies.

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation models associate vision and text to label pixels from an undefined set of classes using textual queries, providing versatile performance on novel datasets. However, large shifts between training and test domains degrade their performance, requiring fine-tuning for effective real-world applications. We introduce Semantic Library Adaptation (SemLA), a novel framework for training-free, test-time domain adaptation. SemLA leverages a library of LoRA-based adapters indexed with CLIP embeddings, dynamically merging the most relevant adapters based on proximity to the target domain in the embedding space. This approach constructs an ad-hoc model tailored to each specific input without additional training. Our method scales efficiently, enhances explainability by tracking adapter contributions, and inherently protects data privacy, making it ideal for sensitive applications. Comprehensive experiments on a 20-domain benchmark built over 10 standard datasets demonstrate SemLA ’s superior adaptability and performance across diverse settings, establishing a new standard in domain adaptation for open-vocabulary semantic segmentation.

This work addresses the challenge of streamed video depth estimation, which expects not only per-frame accuracy but, more importantly, cross-frame consistency. We argue that sharing contextual information between frames or clips is pivotal in fostering temporal consistency. Therefore, we reformulate depth prediction into a conditional generation problem to provide contextual information within a clip and across clips. Specifically, we propose a consistent context-aware training and inference strategy for arbitrarily long videos to provide cross-clip context. We sample independent noise levels for each frame within a clip during training while using a sliding window strategy and initializing overlapping frames with previously predicted frames without adding noise. Moreover, we design an effective training strategy to provide context within a clip. Extensive experimental results validate our design choices and demonstrate the superiority of our approach, dubbed ChronoDepth. Project page: xdimlab.github.io/ChronoDepth.

Event cameras capture sparse, high-temporal-resolution visual information, making them particularly suitable for challenging environments with high-speed motion and strongly varying lighting conditions. However, the lack of large datasets with dense ground-truth depth annotations hinders learning-based monocular depth estimation from event data. To address this limitation, we propose a cross-modal distillation paradigm to generate dense proxy labels leveraging a Vision Foundation Model (VFM). Our strategy requires an event stream spatially aligned with RGB frames, a simple setup even available off-the-shelf, and exploits the robustness of large-scale VFMs. Additionally, we propose to adapt VFMs, either a vanilla one like Depth Anything v2 (DAv2), or deriving from it a novel recurrent architecture to infer depth from monocular event cameras. We evaluate our approach with synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating that i) our cross-modal paradigm achieves competitive performance compared to fully supervised methods without requiring expensive depth annotations, and ii) our VFM-based models achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensors provide efficient active depth sensing at relatively low power budgets; among such designs, only very sparse measurements from low-resolution sensors are considered to meet the increasingly limited power constraints of mobile and AR/VR devices. However, such extreme sparsity levels limit the seamless usage of ToF depth in SLAM. In this work, we propose ToF-Splatting, the first 3D Gaussian Splatting-based SLAM pipeline tailored for using effectively very sparse ToF input data. Our approach improves upon the state of the art by introducing a multi-frame integration module, which produces dense depth maps by merging cues from extremely sparse ToF depth, monocular color, and multi-view geometry. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real sparse ToF datasets demonstrate the viability of our approach, as it achieves state-of-the-art tracking and mapping performances on reference datasets.

Under-display ToF imaging aims to achieve accurate depth sensing through a ToF camera placed beneath a screen panel. However, transparent OLED (TOLED) layers introduce severe degradations-such as signal attenuation, multi-path interference (MPI), and temporal noise-that significantly compromise depth quality. To alleviate this drawback, we propose Learnable Fractional Reaction-Diffusion Dynamics (LFRD2), a hybrid framework that combines the expressive power of neural networks with the interpretability of physical modeling. Specifically, we implement a time-fractional reaction-diffusion module that enables iterative depth refinement with dynamically generated differential orders, capturing long-term dependencies. In addition, we introduce an efficient continuous convolution operator via coefficient prediction and repeated differentiation to further improve restoration quality. Experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/wudiqx106/LFRD2.

NeRF-based SLAM has recently achieved promising results in tracking and reconstruction. However, existing methods face challenges in providing sufficient scene representation, capturing structural information, and maintaining global consistency in scenes emerging significant movement or being forgotten. To this end, we present HS-SLAM to tackle these problems. To enhance scene representation capacity, we propose a hybrid encoding network that combines the complementary strengths of hash-grid, tri-planes, and one-blob, improving the completeness and smoothness of reconstruction. Additionally, we introduce structural supervision by sampling patches of non-local pixels rather than individual rays to better capture the scene structure. To ensure global consistency, we implement an active global bundle adjustment (BA) to eliminate camera drifts and mitigate accumulative errors. Experimental results demonstrate that HS-SLAM outperforms the baselines in tracking and reconstruction accuracy while maintaining the efficiency required for robotics.

We present LightStereo, a cutting-edge stereomatching network crafted to accelerate the matching process. Departing from conventional methodologies that rely on aggregating computationally intensive 4D costs, LightStereo adopts the 3D cost volume as a lightweight alternative. While similar approaches have been explored previously, our breakthrough lies in enhancing performance through a dedicated focus on the channel dimension of the 3D cost volume, where the distribution of matching costs is encapsulated. Our exhaustive exploration has yielded plenty of strategies to amplify the capacity of the pivotal dimension, ensuring both precision and efficiency. We compare the proposed LightStereo with existing state-of-the-art methods across various benchmarks, which demonstrate its superior performance in speed, accuracy, and resource utilization. LightStereo achieves a competitive EPE metric in the SceneFlow datasets while demanding a minimum of only 22 GFLOPs and 17 ms of runtime, and ranks 1st on KITTI 2015 among real-time models. Our comprehensive analysis reveals the effect of 2 D cost aggregation for stereo matching, paving the way for realworld applications of efficient stereo systems. Code is available at https://github.com/XiandaGuo/OpenStereo.

End-to-end autonomous driving systems have recently made rapid progress, thanks to simulators such as CARLA. They can drive without infraction of common driving rules on uncongested roads but are still struggling with dense traffic scenarios. We conjecture that this occurs because it lacks understanding of the dynamics of the surrounding vehicles, caused by the absence of explicit short-term memory within the perception path of end- to-end models. To address this challenge, we revise the perception module to explicitly model temporal information, by extending it with an auxiliary task that is well-known in computer vision research: optical flow. We generate a novel benchmark using the CARLA simulator to train our model, FlowFuser, and prove its superior ability to avoid collisions with other agents on the road.

Self-supervised single-view depth estimation, trained on video sequences, faces significant challenges when dynamic objects are present in the training data, as they violate the basic multi-view geometry assumptions used to compute photometric losses. We propose a novel approach that leverages the relationship between the depth of moving objects and their ground contact points. By iteratively propagating ground features to moving targets in perceptual layers, we recalibrate the depth of dynamic entities while preserving details. Our method maintains the end-to-end training paradigm without additional networks or complex training procedures. Our experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance when estimating depth for dynamic objects and attains superior generalization compared to existing approaches. The relevant experimental code can be accessed at: https://github.com/LiHuanLi/GroundMono

We present Eve3D, a novel framework for dense 3D reconstruction based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). While most existing methods rely on imperfect priors derived from pre-trained vision models, Eve3D fully leverages these priors by jointly optimizing both them and the 3DGS backbone. This joint optimization creates a mutually reinforcing cycle: the priors enhance the quality of 3DGS, which in turn refines the priors, further improving the reconstruction. Additionally, Eve3D introduces a novel optimization step based on bundle adjustment, overcoming the limitations of the highly local supervision in standard 3DGS pipelines. Eve3D achieves state-of-the-art results in surface reconstruction and novel view synthesis on the Tanks & Temples, DTU, and Mip-NeRF360 datasets. while retaining fast convergence, highlighting an unprecedented trade-off between accuracy and speed.

Accurate in-cabin depth estimation is critical for advancing automotive safety and occupant comfort. However, existing datasets for in-vehicle scene understanding tasks often fall short in providing sufficient information and scale needed to evaluate existing depth estimation methods. In this paper, we present a novel benchmark tailored for monocular depth estimation in vehicle interiors, containing both near-infrared (NIR) images and corresponding ground truth depth data. Featuring over 41,000 frames captured across 36 distinct vehicles and 45 different passengers, it offers an unprecedented level of variability for this application domain. Evaluation on our testbench of cutting-edge single-view depth models in different flavors, including zero-shot affine-invariant depth estimation or indomain specialization, reveals that current depth estimation approaches, while promising, still have a significant performance gap to overcome before achieving the reliability required for downstream safety-critical applications. In light of its diverse range and complex scenarios, we believe this benchmark could serve as a common reference for further research concerning in-cabin monocular depth estimation.

Abstract Stereo matching is close to hitting a half-century of history, yet witnessed a rapid evolution in the last decade thanks to deep learning. While previous surveys in the late 2010s covered the first stage of this revolution, the last five years of research brought further ground-breaking advancements to the field. This paper aims to fill this gap in a two-fold manner: first, we offer an in-depth examination of the latest developments in deep stereo matching, focusing on the pioneering architectural designs and groundbreaking paradigms that have redefined the field in the 2020s; second, we present a thorough analysis of the critical challenges that have emerged alongside these advances, providing a comprehensive taxonomy of these issues and exploring the state-of-the-art techniques proposed to address them. By reviewing both the architectural innovations and the key challenges, we offer a holistic view of deep stereo matching and highlight the specific areas that require further investigation. To accompany this survey, we maintain a regularly updated project page that catalogs papers on deep stereo matching in our Awesome-Deep-Stereo-Matching repository.

This paper proposes a new framework for depth completion robust against domain-shifting issues. It exploits the generalization capability of modern stereo networks to face depth completion, by processing fictitious stereo pairs obtained through a virtual pattern projection paradigm. Any stereo network or traditional stereo matcher can be seamlessly plugged into our framework, allowing for the deployment of a virtual stereo setup that is future-proof against advancement in the stereo field. Exhaustive experiments on cross-domain generalization support our claims. Hence, we argue that our framework can help depth completion to reach new deployment scenarios.

Methods for 3D reconstruction from posed frames require prior knowledge about the scene metric range, usually to recover matching cues along the epipolar lines and narrow the search range. However, such prior might not be directly available or estimated inaccurately in real scenarios – e.g., outdoor 3D reconstruction from video sequences – therefore heavily hampering performance. In this paper, we focus on multi-view depth estimation without requiring prior knowledge about the metric range of the scene by proposing RAMDepth, an efficient and purely 2D framework that reverses the depth estimation and matching steps order. Moreover, we demonstrate the capability of our framework to provide rich insights about the quality of the views used for prediction. Additional material can be found on our project page.

We introduce a novel approach for adapting deep stereo networks in a collaborative manner. By building over principles of federated learning, we develop a distributed framework allowing for demanding the optimization process to a number of clients deployed in different environments. This makes it possible, for a deep stereo network running on resourced-constrained devices, to capitalize on the adaptation process carried out by other instances of the same architecture, and thus improve its accuracy in challenging environments even when it cannot carry out adaptation on its own. Experimental results show how federated adaptation performs equivalently to on-device adaptation, and even better when dealing with challenging environments.

We propose MaskingDepth, a semi-supervised learning framework for monocular depth estimation. MaskingDepth is designed to enforce consistency between the depths obtained from strongly-augmented images and the pseudo-depths derived from weakly-augmented images, which enables mitigating the reliance on large ground-truth depth quantities. In this framework, we leverage uncertainty estimation to only retain high-confident depth predictions from the weakly-augmented branch as pseudo-depths. We also present a novel data augmentation, dubbed K-way disjoint masking, that takes advantage of a naïve token masking strategy as an augmentation, while avoiding its scale ambiguity problem between depths from weakly-and strongly-augmented branches and risk of missing small-scale objects. Experiments on KITTI and NYU-Depth-v2 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of each component, its robustness to the use of fewer depth-annotated images, and superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning methods for monocular depth estimation.

Self-supervised multi-frame depth estimation methods only require unlabeled monocular videos for training. However, most existing methods face challenges, including accuracy degradation caused by moving objects in dynamic scenes and scale ambiguity due to the absence of real-world references. In this field, the emergence of low-cost LiDAR sensors highlights the potential to improve the robustness of multi-frame depth estimation by exploiting accurate sparse measurements at the correct scale. Moreover, the LiDAR ranging points often intersect moving objects, providing more precise depth cues for them. This paper explores the impact of few-beam LiDAR data on self-supervised multi-frame depth estimation, proposing a method that fuses multi-frame matching and sparse depth features. It significantly enhances depth estimation robustness, particularly in scenarios involving moving objects and textureless backgrounds. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through comprehensive experiments, showcasing its potential to address the limitations of existing methods and paving the way for more robust and reliable depth estimation based on this paradigm.

Estimating depth from images nowadays yields outstanding results, both in terms of in-domain accuracy and generalization. However, we identify two main challenges that remain open in this field: dealing with non-Lambertian materials and effectively processing high-resolution images. Purposely, we propose a novel dataset that includes accurate and dense ground-truth labels at high resolution, featuring scenes containing several specular and transparent surfaces. Our acquisition pipeline leverages a novel deep space-time stereo framework, enabling easy and accurate labeling with sub-pixel precision. The dataset is composed of 606 samples collected in 85 different scenes, each sample includes both a high-resolution pair (12 Mpx) as well as an unbalanced stereo pair (Left: 12 Mpx, Right: 1.1 Mpx), typical of modern mobile devices that mount sensors with different resolutions. Additionally, we provide manually annotated material segmentation masks and 15 K unlabeled samples. The dataset is composed of a train set and two test sets, the latter devoted to the evaluation of stereo and monocular depth estimation networks. Our experiments highlight the open challenges and future research directions in this field.

We propose a framework that combines traditional, hand-crafted algorithms and recent advances in deep learning to obtain high-quality, high-resolution disparity maps from stereo images. By casting the refinement process as a continuous feature sampling strategy, our neural disparity refinement network can estimate an enhanced disparity map at any output resolution. Our solution can process any disparity map produced by classical stereo algorithms, as well as those predicted by modern stereo networks or even different depth-from-images approaches, such as the COLMAP structure-from-motion pipeline. Nonetheless, when deployed in the former configuration, our framework performs at its best in terms of zero-shot generalization from synthetic to real images. Moreover, its continuous formulation allows for easily handling the unbalanced stereo setup very diffused in mobile phones.

Given sparse depths and the corresponding RGB images, depth completion aims at spatially propagating the sparse measurements throughout the whole image to get a dense depth prediction. Despite the tremendous progress of deep-learning-based depth completion methods, the locality of the convolutional layer or graph model makes it hard for the network to model the long-range relationship between pixels. While recent fully Transformer-based architecture has reported encouraging results with the global receptive field, the performance and efficiency gaps to the well-developed CNN models still exist because of its deteriorative local feature details. This paper proposes a Joint Convolutional Attention and Transformer block (JCAT), which deeply couples the convolutional attention layer and Vision Transformer into one block, as the basic unit to construct our depth completion model in a pyramidal structure. This hybrid architecture naturally benefits both the local connec-tivity of convolutions and the global context of the Trans-former in one single model. As a result, our Completion-Former outperforms state-of-the-art CNNs-based methods on the outdoor KITTI Depth Completion benchmark and indoor NYUv2 dataset, achieving significantly higher effi-ciency (nearly 1/3 FLOPs) compared to pure Transformer-based methods. Code is available at https://github.com/youmi-zym/CompletionFormer.

We introduce a novel framework for training deep stereo networks effortlessly and without any ground-truth. By leveraging state-of-the-art neural rendering solutions, we generate stereo training data from image sequences collected with a single handheld camera. On top of them, a NeRF-supervised training procedure is carried out, from which we exploit rendered stereo triplets to compensate for occlusions and depth maps as proxy labels. This results in stereo networks capable of predicting sharp and detailed disparity maps. Experimental results show that models trained under this regime yield a 30-40% improvement over existing self-supervised methods on the challenging Middle-bury dataset, filling the gap to supervised models and, most times, outperforming them at zero-shot generalization.

This paper proposes a novel framework integrating the principles of active stereo in standard passive camera systems without a physical pattern projector. We virtually project a pattern over the left and right images according to the sparse measurements obtained from a depth sensor. Any such devices can be seamlessly plugged into our framework, allowing for the deployment of a virtual active stereo setup in any possible environment, overcoming the limitation of pattern projectors, such as limited working range or environmental conditions. Experiments on indoor/outdoor datasets, featuring both long and close-range, support the seamless effectiveness of our approach, boosting the accuracy of both stereo algorithms and deep networks.

Neural implicit representations have recently demonstrated compelling results on dense Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) but suffer from the accumulation of errors in camera tracking and distortion in the reconstruction. Purposely, we present GO-SLAM, a deep-learning-based dense visual SLAM framework globally optimizing poses and 3D reconstruction in real-time. Robust pose estimation is at its core, supported by efficient loop closing and online full bundle adjustment, which optimize per frame by utilizing the learned global geometry of the complete history of input frames. Simultaneously, we update the implicit and continuous surface representation on-the-fly to ensure global consistency of 3D reconstruction. Results on various synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that GO-SLAM outperforms state-of-the-art approaches at tracking robustness and reconstruction accuracy. Furthermore, GO-SLAM is versatile and can run with monocular, stereo, and RGB-D input.

The goal of Online Domain Adaptation for semantic segmentation is to handle unforeseeable domain changes that occur during deployment, like sudden weather events. However, the high computational costs associated with brute-force adaptation make this paradigm unfeasible for real-world applications. In this paper we propose HAMLET, a Hardware-Aware Modular Least Expensive Training framework for real-time domain adaptation. Our approach includes a hardware-aware back-propagation orchestration agent (HAMT) and a dedicated domain-shift detector that enables active control over when and how the model is adapted (LT). Thanks to these advancements, our approach is capable of performing semantic segmentation while simultaneously adapting at more than 29FPS on a single consumer-grade GPU. Our framework’s encouraging accuracy and speed trade-off is demonstrated on OnDA and SHIFT benchmarks through experimental results.

Inferring the depth of transparent or mirror (ToM) surfaces represents a hard challenge for either sensors, algorithms, or deep networks. We propose a simple pipeline for learning to estimate depth properly for such surfaces with neural networks, without requiring any ground-truth annotation. We unveil how to obtain reliable pseudo labels by in-painting ToM objects in images and processing them with a monocular depth estimation model. These labels can be used to fine-tune existing monocular or stereo networks, to let them learn how to deal with ToM surfaces. Experimental results on the Booster dataset show the dramatic improvements enabled by our remarkably simple proposal.

This paper tackles the challenges of self-supervised monocular depth estimation in indoor scenes caused by large rotation between frames and low texture. We ease the learning process by obtaining coarse camera poses from monocular sequences through multi-view geometry to deal with the former. However, we found that limited by the scale ambiguity across different scenes in the training dataset, a naïve introduction of geometric coarse poses cannot play a positive role in performance improvement, which is counter-intuitive. To address this problem, we propose to refine those poses during training through rotation and translation/scale optimization. To soften the effect of the low texture, we combine the global reasoning of vision transformers with an overfitting-aware, iterative self-distillation mechanism, providing more accurate depth guidance coming from the network itself. Experiments on NYUv2, ScanNet, 7scenes, and KITTI datasets support the effectiveness of each component in our framework, which sets a new state-of-the-art for indoor self-supervised monocular depth estimation, as well as outstanding generalization ability. Code and models are available at https://github.com/zxcqlf/GasMono

We present TemporalStereo, a coarse-to-fine stereo matching network that is highly efficient, and able to effectively exploit the past geometry and context information to boost matching accuracy. Our network leverages sparse cost volume and proves to be effective when a single stereo pair is given. However, its peculiar ability to use spatio-temporal information across stereo sequences allows TemporalStereo to alleviate problems such as occlusions and reflective regions while enjoying high efficiency also in this latter case. Notably, our model - trained once with stereo videos - can run in both single-pair and temporal modes seamlessly. Experiments show that our network relying on camera motion is robust even to dynamic objects when running on videos. We validate TemporalStereo through extensive experiments on synthetic (SceneFlow, TartanAir) and real (KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015) datasets. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on any of these datasets.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of generating a novel image from an arbitrary viewpoint given a single frame as input. While existing methods operating in this setup aim at predicting the target view depth map to guide the synthesis, without explicit supervision over such a task, we jointly optimize our framework for both novel view synthesis and depth estimation to unleash the synergy between the two at its best. Specifically, a shared depth decoder is trained in a self-supervised manner to predict depth maps that are consistent across the source and target views. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in addressing the challenges of both tasks allowing for higher-quality generated images, as well as more accurate depth for the target viewpoint.

We present a novel depth completion approach agnostic to the sparsity of depth points, that is very likely to vary in many practical applications. State-of-the-art approaches yield accurate results only when processing a specific density and distribution of input points, i.e. the one observed during training, narrowing their deployment in real use cases. On the contrary, our solution is robust to uneven distributions and extremely low densities never witnessed during training. Experimental results on standard indoor and outdoor benchmarks highlight the robustness of our framework, achieving accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art methods when tested with density and distribution equal to the training one while being much more accurate in the other cases. Our pretrained models and further material are available in our project page.

In this paper, we propose the first-ever real benchmark thought for evaluating Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and, in general, Neural Rendering (NR) frameworks. We design and implement an effective pipeline for scanning real objects in quantity and effortlessly. Our scan station is built with less than 500$ hardware budget and can collect roughly 4000 images of a scanned object in just 5 minutes. Such a platform is used to build ScanNeRF, a dataset characterized by several train/val/test splits aimed at benchmarking the performance of modern NeRF methods under different conditions. Accordingly, we evaluate three cuttingedge NeRF variants on it to highlight their strengths and weaknesses. The dataset is available on our project page, together with an online benchmark to foster the development of better and better NeRFs.

Under-display imaging has recently received considerable attention in both academia and industry. As a variation of this technique, under-display ToF (UD-ToF) cameras enable depth sensing for full-screen devices. However, it also brings problems of image blurring, signal-to-noise ratio and ranging accuracy reduction. To address these issues, we propose a cascaded deep network to improve the quality of UD-ToF depth maps. The network comprises two subnets, with the first using a complex-valued network in raw domain to perform denoising, deblurring and raw measurements enhancement jointly, while the second refining depth maps in depth domain based on the proposed multi-scale depth enhancement block (MSDEB). To enable training, we establish a data acquisition device and construct a real UD-ToF dataset by collecting real paired ToF raw data. Besides, we also build a large-scale synthetic UD-ToF dataset through noise analysis. The quantitative and qualitative evaluation results on public datasets and ours demonstrate that the presented network outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms and can further promote full-screen devices in practical applications.

We propose X-NeRF, a novel method to learn a Cross-Spectral scene representation given images captured from cameras with different light spectrum sensitivity, based on the Neural Radiance Fields formulation. X-NeRF optimizes camera poses across spectra during training and exploits Normalized Cross-Device Coordinates (NXDC) to render images of different modalities from arbitrary viewpoints, which are aligned and at the same resolution. Experiments on 16 forward-facing scenes, featuring color, multi-spectral and infrared images, confirm the effectiveness of X-NeRF at modeling Cross-Spectral scene representations.

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation is an attractive solution that does not require hard-to-source depth la-bels for training. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved great success in this task. However, their limited receptive field constrains existing network architectures to reason only locally, dampening the effectiveness of the self-supervised paradigm. In the light of the recent successes achieved by Vision Transformers (ViTs), we propose MonoViT, a brand-new framework combining the global reasoning enabled by ViT models with the flexibility of self-supervised monocular depth estimation. By combining plain convolutions with Transformer blocks, our model can reason locally and globally, yielding depth prediction at a higher level of detail and accuracy, allowing MonoViT to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the established KITTI dataset. Moreover, MonoViT proves its superior generalization capacities on other datasets such as Make3D and DrivingStereo. Source code available at https://github.com/zxcqlf/MonoViT

We present a novel high-resolution and challenging stereo dataset framing indoor scenes annotated with dense and accurate ground-truth disparities. Peculiar to our dataset is the presence of several specular and transparent surfaces, i.e. the main causes of failures for state-of-the-art stereo networks. Our acquisition pipeline leverages a novel deep space-time stereo framework which allows for easy and accurate labeling with sub-pixel precision. We re-lease a total of 419 samples collected in 64 different scenes and annotated with dense ground-truth disparities. Each sample include a high-resolution pair (12 Mpx) as well as an unbalanced pair (Left: 12 Mpx, Right: 1.1 Mpx). Additionally, we provide manually annotated material segmentation masks and 15K unlabeled samples. We evaluate state-of-the-art deep networks based on our dataset, highlighting their limitations in addressing the open challenges in stereo and drawing hints for future research.

We address the problem of registering synchronized color (RGB) and multi-spectral (MS) images featuring very different resolution by solving stereo matching correspondences. Purposely, we introduce a novel RGB-MS dataset framing 13 different scenes in indoor environments and providing a total of 34 image pairs annotated with semi-dense, high-resolution ground-truth labels in the form of disparity maps. To tackle the task, we propose a deep learning architecture trained in a self-supervised manner by exploiting a further RGB camera, required only during training data acquisition. In this setup, we can conveniently learn cross-modal matching in the absence of ground-truth labels by distilling knowledge from an easier RGB-RGB matching task based on a collection of about 11K unlabeled image triplets. Experiments show that the proposed pipeline sets a good performance bar (1.16 pixels average registration error) for future research on this novel, challenging task.

In order to enable Exascale computing, next generation interconnection networks must scale to hundreds of thousands of nodes, and must provide features to also allow the HPC, HPDA, and AI applications to reach Exascale, while benefiting from new hardware and software trends. RED-SEA will pave the way to the next generation of European Exascale interconnects, including the next generation of BXI, as follows: (i) specify the new architecture using hardware-software co-design and a set of applications representative of the new terrain of converging HPC, HPDA, and AI; (ii) test, evaluate, and/or implement the new architectural features at multiple levels, according to the nature of each of them, ranging from mathematical analysis and modeling, to simulation, or to emulation or implementation on FPGA testbeds; (iii) enable seamless communication within and between resource clusters, and therefore development of a high-performance low latency gateway, bridging seamlessly with Ethernet; (iv) add efficient network resource management, thus improving congestion resiliency, virtualization, adaptive routing, collective operations; (v) open the interconnect to new kinds of applications and hardware, with enhancements for end-to-end network services - from programming models to reliability, security, low- latency, and new processors; (vi) leverage open standards and compatible APIs to develop innovative reusable libraries and Fabrics management solutions.

We propose a novel framework to estimate the confidence of a disparity map taking into account, for the first time, the uncertainty affecting the confidence estimation process itself. Conversely to other tasks such as disparity estimation, the uncertainty of confidence directly hints that the confidence should be increased if initially low, but with high uncertainty, decreased otherwise. By modelling such a cue in the form of a second-level confidence, or meta-confidence, our solution allows for finding incorrect predictions inferred by confidence estimator and for learning a correction for them. Our strategy is suited for any state-of-the-art method known in literature, either implemented using random forest classifiers or deep neural networks. Especially, for deep neural networks-based models, we present a multi-headed confidence estimator followed by an uncertainty network, so as to predict mean confidence and meta-confidence within a single network without the cost of lower accuracy, a known limitation in literature for uncertainty estimation. Experimental results on a variety of stereo algorithms and confidence estimation models prove that the modeled meta-confidence is meaningful of the reliability of the estimated confidence and allows for refining it.

Depth perception is pivotal in many fields, such as robotics and autonomous driving, to name a few. Consequently, depth sensors such as LiDARs rapidly spread in many applications. The 3D point clouds generated by these sensors must often be coupled with an RGB camera to understand the framed scene semantically. Usually, the former is projected over the camera image plane, leading to a sparse depth map. Unfortunately, this process, coupled with the intrinsic issues affecting all the depth sensors, yields noise and gross outliers in the final output. Purposely, in this paper, we propose an effective unsupervised framework aimed at explicitly addressing this issue by learning to estimate the confidence of the LiDAR sparse depth map and thus allowing for filtering out the outliers. Experimental results on the KITTI dataset highlight that our framework excels for this purpose. Moreover, we demonstrate how this achievement can improve a wide range of tasks.

This paper introduces a novel deep framework for dense 3D reconstruction from multiple image frames, leveraging a sparse set of depth measurements gathered jointly with image acquisition. Given a deep multi-view stereo network, our framework uses sparse depth hints to guide the neural network by modulating the plane-sweep cost volume built during the forward step, enabling us to infer constantly much more accurate depth maps. Moreover, since multiple viewpoints can provide additional depth measurements, we propose a multi-view guidance strategy that increases the density of the sparse points used to guide the network, thus leading to even more accurate results. We evaluate our Multi-View Guided framework within a variety of state-of-the-art deep multi-view stereo networks, demonstrating its effectiveness at improving the results achieved by each of them on BlendedMVG and DTU datasets.

The recent advancements in deep learning have demonstrated that inferring high-quality depth maps from a single image has become feasible and accurate, thanks to convolutional neural networks (CNNs), but how to process such compute- and memory-intensive models on portable and low-power devices remains a concern. Dynamic energy-quality scaling is an interesting yet less explored option in this field. It can improve efficiency through opportunistic computing policies where performances are boosted only when needed, achieving on average substantial energy savings. Implementing such a computing paradigm encompasses the availability of a scalable inference model, which is the target of this work. Specifically, we describe and characterize the design of an energy-quality scalable pyramidal network (EQPyD-Net), a lightweight CNN capable of modulating at runtime the computational effort with minimal memory resources. We describe the architecture of the network and the optimization flow, covering the important aspects that enable the dynamic scaling, namely, the optimized training procedures, the compression stage via fixed-point quantization, and the code optimization for the deployment on commercial low-power CPUs adopted in the edge segment. To assess the effect of the proposed design knobs, we evaluated the prediction quality on the standard KITTI data set and the energy and memory resources on the ARM Cortex-A53 CPU. The collected results demonstrate the flexibility of the proposed network and its energy efficiency. EQPyD-Net can be shifted across five operating points, ranging from a maximum accuracy of 82.2% with 0.4 Frame/J and up to 92.6% of energy savings with 6.1% of accuracy loss, still keeping a compact memory footprint of 5.2 MB for the weights and 38.3 MB (in the worst case) for the processing.

Stereo matching is one of the most popular techniques to estimate dense depth maps by finding the disparity between matching pixels on two, synchronized and rectified images. Alongside with the development of more accurate algorithms, the research community focused on finding good strategies to estimate the reliability, i.e., the confidence, of estimated disparity maps. This information proves to be a powerful cue to naively find wrong matches as well as to improve the overall effectiveness of a variety of stereo algorithms according to different strategies. In this paper, we review more than ten years of developments in the field of confidence estimation for stereo matching. We extensively discuss and evaluate existing confidence measures and their variants, from hand-crafted ones to the most recent, state-of-the-art learning based methods. We study the different behaviors of each measure when applied to a pool of different stereo algorithms and, for the first time in literature, when paired with a state-of-the-art deep stereo network. Our experiments, carried out on five different standard datasets, provide a comprehensive overview of the field, highlighting in particular both strengths and limitations of learning-based strategies.

Stereo matching is one of the longest-standing problems in computer vision with close to 40 years of studies and research. Throughout the years the paradigm has shifted from local, pixel-level decision to various forms of discrete and continuous optimization to data-driven, learning-based methods. Recently, the rise of machine learning and the rapid proliferation of deep learning enhanced stereo matching with new exciting trends and applications unthinkable until a few years ago. Interestingly, the relationship between these two worlds is two-way. While machine, and especially deep, learning advanced the state-of-the-art in stereo matching, stereo itself enabled new ground-breaking methodologies such as self-supervised monocular depth estimation based on deep networks. In this paper, we review recent research in the field of learning-based depth estimation from single and binocular images highlighting the synergies, the successes achieved so far and the open challenges the community is going to face in the immediate future.

Depth estimation is crucial in several computer vision applications, and a recent trend in this field aims at inferring such a cue from a single camera. Unfortunately, despite the compelling results achieved, state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation methods are computationally demanding, thus precluding their practical deployment in several application contexts characterized by low-power constraints. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network based on a shallow pyramidal architecture, referred to as$\mu $PyD-Net, enabling monocular depth estimation on microcontrollers. The network is trained in a peculiar self-supervised manner leveraging proxy labels obtained through a traditional stereo algorithm. Moreover, we propose optimization strategies aimed at performing computations with quantized 8-bit data and map the high-level description of the network to low-level layers optimized for the target microcontroller architecture. Exhaustive experimental results on standard datasets and an in-depth evaluation with a device belonging to the popular Arm Cortex-M family confirm that obtaining sufficiently accurate monocular depth estimation on microcontrollers is feasible. To the best of our knowledge, our proposal is the first one enabling such remarkable achievement, paving the way for the deployment of monocular depth cues onto the tiny end-nodes of distributed sensor networks.

Single-image depth estimation represents a longstanding challenge in computer vision and although it is an ill-posed problem, deep learning enabled astonishing results leveraging both supervised and self-supervised training paradigms. State-of-the-art solutions achieve remarkably accurate depth estimation from a single image deploying huge deep architectures, requiring powerful dedicated hardware to run in a reasonable amount of time. This overly demanding complexity makes them unsuited for a broad category of applications requiring devices with constrained resources or memory consumption. To tackle this issue, in this paper a family of compact, yet effective CNNs for monocular depth estimation is proposed, by leveraging self-supervision from a binocular stereo rig. Our lightweight architectures, namely PyD-Net and PyD-Net2, compared to complex state-of-the-art trade a small drop in accuracy to drastically reduce the runtime and memory requirements by a factor ranging from$2\times $to$100\times $. Moreover, our networks can run real-time monocular depth estimation on a broad set of embedded or consumer devices, even not equipped with a GPU, by early stopping the inference with negligible (or no) loss in accuracy, making it ideally suited for real applications with strict constraints on hardware resources or power consumption.

We introduce a novel architecture for neural disparity refinement aimed at facilitating deployment of 3D computer vision on cheap and widespread consumer devices, such as mobile phones. Our approach relies on a continuous formulation that enables to estimate a refined disparity map at any arbitrary output resolution. Thereby, it can handle effectively the unbalanced camera setup typical of nowadays mobile phones, which feature both high and low resolution RGB sensors within the same device. Moreover, our neural network can process seamlessly the output of a variety of stereo methods and, by refining the disparity maps computed by a traditional matching algorithm like SGM, it can achieve unpaired zero-shot generalization performance compared to state-of-the-art end-to-end stereo models.

This paper deals with the scarcity of data for training optical flow networks, highlighting the limitations of existing sources such as labeled synthetic datasets or unlabeled real videos. Specifically, we introduce a framework to generate accurate ground-truth optical flow annotations quickly and in large amounts from any readily available single real picture. Given an image, we use an off-the-shelf monocular depth estimation network to build a plausible point cloud for the observed scene. Then, we virtually move the camera in the reconstructed environment with known motion vectors and rotation angles, allowing us to synthesize both a novel view and the corresponding optical flow field connecting each pixel in the input image to the one in the new frame. When trained with our data, state-of-the-art optical flow networks achieve superior generalization to unseen real data compared to the same models trained either on annotated synthetic datasets or unlabeled videos, and better specialization if combined with synthetic images.

This paper proposes a framework to guide an optical flow network with external cues to achieve superior accuracy either on known or unseen domains. Given the availability of sparse yet accurate optical flow hints from an external source, these are injected to modulate the correlation scores computed by a state-of-the-art optical flow network and guide it towards more accurate predictions. Although no real sensor can provide sparse flow hints, we show how these can be obtained by combining depth measurements from active sensors with geometry and hand-crafted optical flow algorithms, leading to accurate enough hints for our purpose. Experimental results with a state-of-the-art flow network on standard benchmarks support the effectiveness of our framework, both in simulated and real conditions.

End-to-end deep networks represent the state of the art for stereo matching. While excelling on images framing environments similar to the training set, major drops in accuracy occur in unseen domains (e.g., when moving from synthetic to real scenes). In this paper we introduce a novel family of architectures, namely Matching-Space Networks (MS-Nets), with improved generalization properties. By replacing learning-based feature extraction from image RGB values with matching functions and confidence measures from conventional wisdom, we move the learning process from the color space to the Matching Space, avoiding over-specialization to domain specific features. Extensive experimental results on four real datasets highlight that our proposal leads to superior generalization to unseen environments over conventional deep architectures, keeping accuracy on the source domain almost unaltered. Our code is available at https://qithub.com/ccj5351/MS-Nets.

Scene flow is a challenging task aimed at jointly estimating the 3D structure and motion of the sensed environment. Although deep learning solutions achieve outstanding performance in terms of accuracy, these approaches divide the whole problem into standalone tasks (stereo and optical flow) addressing them with independent networks. Such a strategy dramatically increases the complexity of the training procedure and requires power-hungry GPUs to infer scene flow barely at 1 FPS. Conversely, we propose DWARF, a novel and lightweight architecture able to infer full scene flow jointly reasoning about depth and optical flow easily and elegantly trainable end-to-end from scratch. Moreover, since ground truth images for full scene flow are scarce, we propose to leverage on the knowledge learned by networks specialized in stereo or flow, for which much more data are available, to distill proxy annotations. Exhaustive experiments show that i) DWARF runs at about 10 FPS on a single high-end GPU and about 1 FPS on NVIDIA Jetson TX2 embedded at KITTI resolution, with moderate drop in accuracy compared to 10× deeper models, ii) learning from many distilled samples is more effective than from the few, annotated ones available.

Self-supervised paradigms for monocular depth estimation are very appealing since they do not require ground truth annotations at all. Despite the astonishing results yielded by such methodologies, learning to reason about the uncertainty of the estimated depth maps is of paramount importance for practical applications, yet uncharted in the literature. Purposely, we explore for the first time how to estimate the uncertainty for this task and how this affects depth accuracy, proposing a novel peculiar technique specifically designed for self-supervised approaches. On the standard KITTI dataset, we exhaustively assess the performance of each method with different self-supervised paradigms. Such evaluation highlights that our proposal i) always improves depth accuracy significantly and ii) yields state-of-the-art results concerning uncertainty estimation when training on sequences and competitive results uniquely deploying stereo pairs.

Whole understanding of the surroundings is paramount to autonomous systems. Recent works have shown that deep neural networks can learn geometry (depth) and motion (optical flow) from a monocular video without any explicit supervision from ground truth annotations, particularly hard to source for these two tasks. In this paper, we take an additional step toward holistic scene understanding with monocular cameras by learning depth and motion alongside with semantics, with supervision for the latter provided by a pre-trained network distilling proxy ground truth images. We address the three tasks jointly by a) a novel training protocol based on knowledge distillation and self-supervision and b) a compact network architecture which enables efficient scene understanding on both power hungry GPUs and low-power embedded platforms. We thoroughly assess the performance of our framework and show that it yields state-of-the-art results for monocular depth estimation, optical flow and motion segmentation.

Deep architectures represent the state-of-the-art for perceiving depth from stereo images. Although these methods are highly accurate, it is crucial to effectively detect any outlier through confidence measures since a wrong perception of even small portions of the sensed scene might lead to catastrophic consequences, for instance, in autonomous driving. Purposely, state-of-the-art confidence estimation methods rely on deep-networks as well. In this paper, arguing that these tasks are two sides of the same coin, we propose a novel paradigm for their joint training. Specifically, inspired by the successful deployment of GANs in other fields, we design two deep architectures: a generator for disparity estimation and a discriminator for distinguishing correct assignments from outliers. The two networks are jointly trained in a new peculiar weakly adversarial manner pushing the former to fix the errors detected by the discriminator while keeping the correct prediction unchanged. Experimental results on standard stereo datasets prove that such joint training paradigm is beneficial. Moreover, an additional outcome of our proposal is the ability to detect outliers with better accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art.

Scene understanding is paramount in robotics, self-navigation, augmented reality, and many other fields. To fully accomplish this task, an autonomous agent has to infer the 3D structure of the sensed scene (to know where it looks at) and its content (to know what it sees). To tackle the two tasks, deep neural networks trained to infer semantic segmentation and depth from stereo images are often the preferred choices. Specifically, Semantic Stereo Matching can be tackled by either standalone models trained for the two tasks independently or joint end-to-end architectures. Nonetheless, as proposed so far, both solutions are inefficient because requiring two forward passes in the former case or due to the complexity of a single network in the latter, although jointly tackling both tasks is usually beneficial in terms of accuracy. In this paper, we propose a single compact and lightweight architecture for real-time semantic stereo matching. Our framework relies on coarse-to-fine estimations in a multi-stage fashion, allowing: i) very fast inference even on embedded devices, with marginal drops in accuracy, compared to state-of-the-art networks, ii) trade accuracy for speed, according to the specific application requirements. Experimental results on high-end GPUs as well as on an embedded Jetson TX2 confirm the superiority of semantic stereo matching compared to standalone tasks and highlight the versatility of our framework on any hardware and for any application.

State-of-the-art approaches to infer dense depth measurements from images rely on CNNs trained end-to-end on a vast amount of data. However, these approaches suffer a drastic drop in accuracy when dealing with environments much different in appearance and/or context from those observed at training time. This domain shift issue is usually addressed by fine-tuning on smaller sets of images from the target domain annotated with depth labels. Unfortunately, relying on such supervised labeling is seldom feasible in most practical settings. Therefore, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation technique which does not require groundtruth labels. Our method relies only on image pairs and leverages on classical stereo algorithms to produce disparity measurements alongside with confidence estimators to assess upon their reliability. We propose to fine-tune both depth-from-stereo as well as depth-from-mono architectures by a novel confidence-guided loss function that handles the measured disparities as noisy labels weighted according to the estimated confidence. Extensive experimental results based on standard datasets and evaluation protocols prove that our technique can address effectively the domain shift issue with both stereo and monocular depth prediction architectures and outperforms other state-of-the-art unsupervised loss functions that may be alternatively deployed to pursue domain adaptation.

Estimating depth from a single image represents an attractive alternative to more traditional approaches leveraging multiple cameras. In this field, deep learning yielded outstanding results at the cost of needing large amounts of data labeled with precise depth measurements for training. An issue softened by self-supervised approaches leveraging monocular sequences or stereo pairs in place of expensive ground truth depth annotations. This paper enables to further improve monocular depth estimation by integrating into existing self-supervised networks a geometrical prior. Specifically, we propose a sparsity-invariant autoencoder able to process the output of conventional visual odometry algorithms working in synergy with depth-from-mono networks. Experimental results on the KITTI dataset show that by exploiting the geometrical prior, our proposal: i) outperforms existing approaches in the literature and ii) couples well with both compact and complex depth-from-mono architectures, allowing for its deployment on high-end GPUs as well as on embedded devices (e.g., NVIDIA Jetson TX2).

Stereo is a prominent technique to infer dense depth maps from images, and deep learning further pushed forward the state-of-the-art, making end-to-end architectures unrivaled when enough data is available for training. However, deep networks suffer from significant drops in accuracy when dealing with new environments. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce Guided Stereo Matching, a novel paradigm leveraging a small amount of sparse, yet reliable depth measurements retrieved from an external source enabling to ameliorate this weakness. The additional sparse cues required by our method can be obtained with any strategy (e.g., a LiDAR) and used to enhance features linked to corresponding disparity hypotheses. Our formulation is general and fully differentiable, thus enabling to exploit the additional sparse inputs in pre-trained deep stereo networks as well as for training a new instance from scratch. Extensive experiments on three standard datasets and two state-of-the-art deep architectures show that even with a small set of sparse input cues, i) the proposed paradigm enables significant improvements to pre-trained networks. Moreover, ii) training from scratch notably increases accuracy and robustness to domain shifts. Finally, iii) it is suited and effective even with traditional stereo algorithms such as SGM.

Deep convolutional neural networks trained end-to-end are the state-of-the-art methods to regress dense disparity maps from stereo pairs. These models, however, suffer from a notable decrease in accuracy when exposed to scenarios significantly different from the training set (e.g., real vs synthetic images, etc.). We argue that it is extremely unlikely to gather enough samples to achieve effective training/tuning in any target domain, thus making this setup impractical for many applications. Instead, we propose to perform unsupervised and continuous online adaptation of a deep stereo network, which allows for preserving its accuracy in any environment. However, this strategy is extremely computationally demanding and thus prevents real-time inference. We address this issue introducing a new lightweight, yet effective, deep stereo architecture, Modularly ADaptive Network(MADNet), and developing a Modular ADaptation (MAD) algorithm, which independently trains sub-portions of the network. By deploying MADNet together with MAD we introduce the first real-time self-adaptive deep stereo system enabling competitive performance on heterogeneous datasets. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/CVLAB-Unibo/Real-time-self-adaptive-deep-stereo.

Depth estimation from a single image represents a fascinating, yet challenging problem with countless applications. Recent works proved that this task could be learned without direct supervision from ground truth labels leveraging image synthesis on sequences or stereo pairs. Focusing on this second case, in this paper we leverage stereo matching in order to improve monocular depth estimation. To this aim we propose monoResMatch, a novel deep architecture designed to infer depth from a single input image by synthesizing features from a different point of view, horizontally aligned with the input image, performing stereo matching between the two cues. In contrast to previous works sharing this rationale, our network is the first trained end-to-end from scratch. Moreover, we show how obtaining proxy ground truth annotation through traditional stereo algorithms, such as Semi-Global Matching, enables more accurate monocular depth estimation still countering the need for expensive depth labels by keeping a self-supervised approach. Exhaustive experimental results prove how the synergy between i) the proposed monoResMatch architecture and ii) proxy-supervision attains state-of-the-art for self-supervised monocular depth estimation. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/fabiotosi92/monoResMatch-Tensorflow.

This work deals with the implementation of energy-efficient monocular depth estimation using a low-cost CPU for low-power embedded systems. It first describes the PyD-Net depth estimation network, which consists of a lightweight CNN able to approach state-of-the-art accuracy with ultra-low resource usage. Then it proposes an accuracy-driven complexity reduction strategy based on a hardware-friendly fixed-point quantization. Finally, it introduces the low-level optimization enabling effective use of integer neural kernels. The objective is threefold: (i) prove the efficiency of the new quantization flow on a depth estimation network, that is, the capability to retaining the accuracy reached by floating-point arithmetic using 16- and 8-bit integers, (ii) demonstrate the portability of the quantized model into a general-purpose 32-bit RISC architecture of the ARM Cortex family, (iii) quantify the accuracy-energy tradeoff of unsupervised monocular estimation to establish its use in the embedded domain. The experiments have been run on a Raspberry PI board powered by a Broadcom BCM2837 chipset. A parametric analysis conducted over the KITTI date-set shows marginal accuracy loss with 16-bit (8-bit) integers and energy savings up to 6.55× (9.23×) w.r.t. floating-point. Compared to high-end CPU and GPU the proposed solution improves scalability.

Obtaining accurate depth measurements out of a single image represents a fascinating solution to 3D sensing. CNNs led to considerable improvements in this field, and recent trends replaced the need for ground-truth labels with geometry-guided image reconstruction signals enabling unsupervised training. Currently, for this purpose, state-of-the-art techniques rely on images acquired with a binocular stereo rig to predict inverse depth (i.e., disparity) according to the aforementioned supervision principle. However, these methods suffer from well-known problems near occlusions, left image border, etc inherited from the stereo setup. Therefore, in this paper, we tackle these issues by moving to a trinocular domain for training. Assuming the central image as the reference, we train a CNN to infer disparity representations pairing such image with frames on its left and right side. This strategy allows obtaining depth maps not affected by typical stereo artifacts. Moreover, being trinocular datasets seldom available, we introduce a novel interleaved training procedure enabling to enforce the trinocular assumption outlined from current binocular datasets. Exhaustive experimental results on the KITTI dataset confirm that our proposal outperforms state-of-the-art methods for unsupervised monocular depth estimation trained on binocular stereo pairs as well as any known methods relying on other cues.

Unsupervised depth estimation from a single image is a very attractive technique with several implications in robotic, autonomous navigation, augmented reality and so on. This topic represents a very challenging task and the advent of deep learning enabled to tackle this problem with excellent results. However, these architectures are extremely deep and complex. Thus, real-time performance can be achieved only by leveraging power-hungry GPUs that do not allow to infer depth maps in application fields characterized by low-power constraints. To tackle this issue, in this paper we propose a novel architecture capable to quickly infer an accurate depth map on a CPU, even of an embedded system, using a pyramid of features extracted from a single input image. Similarly to state-of-the-art, we train our network in an unsupervised manner casting depth estimation as an image reconstruction problem. Extensive experimental results on the KITTI dataset show that compared to the top performing approach our network has similar accuracy but a much lower complexity (about 6% of parameters) enabling to infer a depth map for a KITTI image in about 1.7 s on the Raspberry Pi 3 and at more than 8 Hz on a standard CPU. Moreover, by trading accuracy for efficiency, our network allows to infer maps at about 2 Hz and 40 Hz respectively, still being more accurate than most state-of-the-art slower methods. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first method enabling such performance on CPUs paving the way for effective deployment of unsupervised monocular depth estimation even on embedded systems.

Confidence measures estimate unreliable disparity assignments performed by a stereo matching algorithm and, as recently proved, can be used for several purposes. This paper aims at increasing, by means of a deep network, the effectiveness of state-of-the-art confidence measures exploiting the local consistency assumption. We exhaustively evaluated our proposal on 23 confidence measures, including 5 top-performing ones based on random-forests and CNNs, training our networks with two popular stereo algorithms and a small subset (25 out of 194 frames) of the KITTI 2012 dataset. Experimental results show that our approach dramatically increases the effectiveness of all the 23 confidence measures on the remaining frames. Moreover, without re-training, we report a further cross-evaluation on KITTI 2015 and Middlebury 2014 confirming that our proposal provides remarkable improvements for each confidence measure even when dealing with significantly different input data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first method to move beyond conventional pixel-wise confidence estimation.

Confidence measures aim at detecting unreliable depth measurements and play an important role for many purposes and in particular, as recently shown, to improve stereo accuracy. This topic has been thoroughly investigated by Hu and Mordohai in 2010 (and 2012) considering 17 confidence measures and two local algorithms on the two datasets available at that time. However, since then major breakthroughs happened in this field: the availability of much larger and challenging datasets, novel and more effective stereo algorithms including ones based on deep learning and confidence measures leveraging on machine learning techniques. Therefore, this paper aims at providing an exhaustive and updated review and quantitative evaluation of 52 (actually, 76 considering variants) state-of-the-art confidence measures - focusing on recent ones mostly based on random-forests and deep learning - with three algorithms on the challenging datasets available today. Moreover we deal with problems inherently induced by learning-based confidence measures. How are these methods able to generalize to new data? How a specific training improves their effectiveness? How more effective confidence measures can actually improve the overall stereo accurac?

Recent ground-breaking works have shown that deep neural networks can be trained end-to-end to regress dense disparity maps directly from image pairs. Computer generated imagery is deployed to gather the large data corpus required to train such networks, an additional fine-tuning allowing to adapt the model to work well also on real and possibly diverse environments. Yet, besides a few public datasets such as Kitti, the ground-truth needed to adapt the network to a new scenario is hardly available in practice. In this paper we propose a novel unsupervised adaptation approach that enables to fine-tune a deep learning stereo model without any ground-truth information. We rely on off-the-shelf stereo algorithms together with state-of-the-art confidence measures, the latter able to ascertain upon correctness of the measurements yielded by former. Thus, we train the network based on a novel loss-function that penalizes predictions disagreeing with the highly confident disparities provided by the algorithm and enforces a smoothness constraint. Experiments on popular datasets (KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015 and Middlebury 2014) and other challenging test images demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal.

Stereo matching is a popular technique to infer depth from two or more images and wealth of methods have been proposed to deal with this problem. Despite these efforts, finding accurate stereo correspondences is still an open problem. The strengths and weaknesses of existing methods are often complementary and in this paper, motivated by recent trends in this field, we exploit this fact by proposing Deep Stereo Fusion, a Convolutional Neural Network capable of combining the output of multiple stereo algorithms in order to obtain more accurate result with respect to each input disparity map. Deep Stereo Fusion process a 3D features vector, encoding both spatial and cross-algorithm information, in order to select the best disparity hypothesis among those proposed by the single stereo matchers. To the best of our knowledge, our proposal is the first i) to leverage on deep learning and ii) able to predict the optimal disparity assignments by taking only as input cue the disparity maps. This second feature makes our method suitable for deployment even when other cues (e.g., confidence) are not available such as when dealing with disparity maps provided by off-the-shelf 3D sensors. We thoroughly evaluate our proposal on the KITTI stereo benchmark with respect state-of-the-art in this field.

Inferring dense depth from stereo is crucial for several computer vision applications and Semi Global Matching (SGM) is often the preferred choice due to its good tradeoff between accuracy and computation requirements. Nevertheless, it suffers of two major issues: streaking artifacts caused by the Scanline Optimization (SO) approach, at the core of this algorithm, may lead to inaccurate results and the high memory footprint that may become prohibitive with high resolution images or devices with constrained resources. In this paper, we propose a smart scanline aggregation approach for SGM aimed at dealing with both issues. In particular, the contribution of this paper is threefold: i) leveraging on machine learning, proposes a novel generalpurpose confidence measure suited for any for stereo algorithm, based on O(1) features, that outperforms state of-the-art ii) taking advantage of this confidence measure proposes a smart aggregation strategy for SGM enabling significant improvements with a very small overhead iii) the overall strategy drastically reduces the memory footprint of SGM and, at the same time, improves its effectiveness and execution time. We provide extensive experimental results, including a cross-validation with multiple datasets (KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015 and Middlebury 2014).

In this paper we propose an effective and wearable mobility aid for people suffering of visual impairments purely based on 3D computer vision and machine learning techniques. By wearing our device the users can perceive, guided by audio messages and tactile feedback, crucial information concerned with the surrounding environment and hence avoid obstacles along the path. Our proposal can work in synergy with the white cane and allows for very effective and real-time obstacle detection on an embedded computer, by processing the point-cloud provided by a custom RGBD sensor, based on passive stereo vision. Moreover, our system, leveraging on deep-learning techniques, enables to semantically categorize the detected obstacles in order to increase the awareness of the explored environment. It can optionally work in synergy with a smartphone, wirelessly connected to the the proposed mobility aid, exploiting its audio capability and standard GPS-based navigation tools such as Google Maps. The overall system can operate in real-time for hours using a small battery, making it suitable for everyday life. Experimental results confirmed that our proposal has excellent obstacle detection performance and has a promising semantic categorization capability.